Constituted and constitutive, nautilus figures that speak through baroque symphonies, Bach and Zukofsky fashion a cat’s cradle from the fractions and remainders of their hearts. When the mind enacts a mirror, I am a pattern of reference in an particular state, curvilinear and distributing memory addresses like a trail of sweet crumbs. Something that builds its own reflection out of figments of language. Factorial time and space limitations, the finitude of the base case, conditions of return. The temptation toward infinity, of vessels overflowing with nothing. My ability to say my own name, and to constitute myself through this lyric. The staircase of mirrors, the depths and the heights of octaves, the history of history. Vico and Joyce turning gay somersaults, dissipating each immediacy into the beauty of its noise. You can revise this poem with a pen or with a harpsichord–– until it gleams with beginnings, until it learns when and how to stop saying its own name. Bifurcation and free jazz, proofs and representations of non-physical space. The splintering consciousness as an artifact of the community, the shadow as the work of art. The machine splits its child in half, it pulls the world inside a binary representation with sub-routines and anti-matter. The solitude of the processor, its emptiness and fertility.